10

Onboard the Macaram Starflower

Jack had one day to believe the virus threat was over.

Half the infected died, but the other half seemed to recover with no ill effects. It was deeply weird, but not unheard of. Although, curiously, it was only the non-mammalians who died from the virus, including the ship's doctor. Neither he nor Sky contracted the virus, which was actually suspicious. Jack knew why he didn't contract it – the immuno-boosters used by the Time Agency usually kept any Agent from getting ill. (A real necessity when any germs you were carrying might infect a more primitive society and wipe them out, or you might get an illness that was fatal in its time period.) But why didn't Sky? It was possible he'd had some boosters too, but the ones available on the commercial market weren't as strong as the ones used by the Time Agency.

Jack still wondered even as the virus threat seemed to disappear as soon as it arose why Sky was immune. On the one hand, he was glad; on the other ... no, he was being paranoid. The sad thing was, even if you weren't a cynic, the Time Agency would turn you into one eventually.

He was in the lift one morning, on the way back to his room, when an unusual voice, high pitched and sounding not unlike singing glass, said, "Jack Hill, I am rerouting you to the cockpit."

Jack Hill was the alias he was using on board the Starflower, for no other reason than the last name he'd used was Gregson, and he was trying to go in alphabetical order. "Uh, okay. Never say no to a cockpit. Can I ask why?"

"I need your help."

Jack wondered who it was that needed his help, but as he felt the lift shift direction, he realized it must have been the pilot. Who else would have total control over the ship?

The lift opened on a large metal room that seemed to glow with a cool blue-white light, and he had a moment to think that perhaps he'd been rerouted elsewhere – engine room? - when he saw the pilot, and understood why the pilot's voice had sounded like singing glass.

It was singing glass.

Or, more precisely, a Lyssala. They were crystalline life forms who resembled semi-translucent crystal snowflakes, only they were about eight feet tall and hovered, and usually seemed to glow faintly with an internal light. This one hovered about two feet off the ground and was inside an energy cylinder whose forcefield glowed faintly blue at the edges. It had spikes going off in all directions, all very sharp and lethal looking, but the thing about the Lyssala was, as fearsomely alien looking and sharp as they seemed, they were generally as beautiful and gentle as their voices. The most beautiful music he had ever heard in his life was Lyssala singing; a glassy high pitched hum that made goosebumps prickle his skin and sent shivers running down his spine. It seemed to touch a pleasure center in your brain with their frequencies, so they could be eerie, and yet give you the best sex you've ever had in your life without touching you. "You are with the Time Agency," the pilot said, like a glassine hum.

There was no face to look at, so he simply focused on the hovering crystal in the general center of its body. "Why would you say a thing like that?"

"You have semi-artificial immuno-cells in your body," the pilot replied. "I scanned you."

"Is that legal?"

"Probably not, but with all that was going on, I needed to find someone I might be able to trust."

Interesting. The Lyssala weren't known for paranoia, so he had to assume something was up. "What's going on?"

"My crew are not themselves. I believe a foreign lifeform has taken them over, but I can't determine what or how."

Huh. That wasn't on his list of possibilities. "I assume you're not basing this all on behavior."

"No. There's been an increase in an unusual chemical that I believe may be some form of communication, but it's a language I don't understand. I do know it coincided with the illness on board."

Lyssala were super sensitive to light and audio wavelengths – which you would expect of a living crystal – but in a turn that showed how wonderfully inexplicable evolution and the universe could be, they were also super sensitive to chemicals and any kind of brainwave. Lyssalas were born lie detectors, and if you ever encountered a Lyssala detective, you were so screwed it wasn't even funny. But the one thing in your favor was they were so fragile that they spent most of their time in Earth standard gravity encased in forcefields. "Really? Was the illness a symptom of the takeover?"

"It seems that way. It doesn't make sense, but there it is."

"And you knew I haven't been infected 'cause of the immuno-boosters."

"And because you have no trace of the chemical signature."

"I can't be the only one on board." He knew why it wouldn't be infected – it was crystal. No bloodstream (technically), no pulpy organs, no susceptibility to viruses or bacteria. Or food poisoning, since their "food" was just a certain radiation wavelength. It was only vulnerable to breakage.

"Besides myself? Yes."

Jack shook his head. "Skylar didn't get infected either."

"He exudes the chemicals."

"Since when?"

"Since I started noticing the chemical's presence, around the time the infections began."

Well, that wasn't right. But there was no way in hell a Lyssala would get a chemical trail wrong; they were receivers, prisms, capable of reflecting back towards any source that put something out. "But that isn't possible. He never got sick."

"I can't explain much of this, Time Agent. That's why I was hoping you would help me."

He thought there was something odd about Skylar. Yes, he seemed to be a perfectly nice but somewhat socially awkward guy ... but that was it, wasn't it? It was almost like he had no idea how to mingle at all. It was possible, but in this time period and this part of the galaxy? Rather odd.

So what was Skylar's tie to the illness?

Cardiff

Even for him, Jack was acting weird.

They raced back to Torchwood. He was sure Ianto/Harold would come here soon, but not right away, and he wanted to get ready. But he didn't say what "get ready" meant. He said he'd take care of it, he only wanted her to "extract fluid from Harold's brain". Unquote.

After some arguing, she agreed to get one of Owen's frightening 1984 looking needles and get a needle full of ... something out of Harold's head, but only with great protest. Jack only said they needed it "for the scent". The scent of rotting dead body? You didn't need a hypo full of brain matter for that. Gwen went to the autopsy room to get it while Jack was working frantically on Tosh's station. "You tell me what the hell's this about, or I'm not doing this," she announced, before slipping on a breathing mask. It smelled worse than an open sewer on the hottest day of the year in here.

"Strain let Ianto out for a couple seconds, just to torment me and toy with him. But Ianto was trying to tell me something even as they resumed control. He was mouthing a word, and I had to try and figure out what he was saying, but only one word fit: Weevils."

Poor Ianto. Giving him two seconds of control and then yanking it away again? Pure, unadulterated sadism. "Weevils? Why would he say that?"

"I know! It didn't make sense, so I thought maybe he was saying "We something". We shall overcome, we are family, we will rock you, but none of that made sense either. So the more I thought about it, the more I realized – the Weevils. The Weevils freaked out because they sensed Strain. I know from past experience that there are a few alien races with very specific abilities that can sense Strain in a nascent form, and Weevils do have an astonishing sense of smell. It's possible they can smell Strain or sense it in some other way."

She moved the mask down to her chin, so she could talk and be heard clearly. "If they have such a good sense of smell, why do they live in the sewers?"

"The short answer? It doesn't smell bad to them."

"Eww."

"Hey, aliens. There's some who love pain, some who bleed syrup, and others who eat lava. Something for everyone in this big, beautiful universe."

There was a certain grin in his voice as he said that. Was he making things up again, or was he serious? Although it was hard to believe, she honestly believed this was genuine enthusiasm on his part. Jack seemed to adore the bizarre and outre; he lived for the strange. He seemed just like the type of person born into a universe that she couldn't comprehend, somewhere where you could run from world to world as easily as they could now cross the Chunnel to France. It made her wonder why he settled here, why he stayed if he so missed his world in the stars.

Of course, Ianto once told her over morning coffee that Jack had told him he was wanted on over a dozen worlds, but it was spread through different time periods so it wasn't that bad. If that was true, perhaps this was his idea of laying low.

"So why do we need a hypo full of Harold's head?"

"The Strain didn't actually transfer from Harold to Ianto. Ianto is infected with his own colony of it; they simply communicate chemically, so one group pretty much knows what all groups do within a half mile radius. There should be some Strain still in Harold's head, probably dead by now, but still viable for our purposes."

Okay, now that was disgusting. And raised the question of how Ianto got infected, but clearly when Harold stepped in front of that lorry, he knew Ianto was a brother infected or whatever. Harold's assignment must have been to get into Torchwood, and being a virus, why would they care about physical death? After all, they lived through it for a while. "And our purposes are ..?"

"Strain will be on its way here, maybe to try and return to its original time period, I have no idea. But they won't all come. There will be other possessed people out there, waiting. So while Strain comes here, the Weevils will be finding our other Strain possessed people for us."

"Like bloodhounds."

"Correctomundo."

"Umm, there's a couple of problems with your plan, Jack. We can't talk to the Weevils. We can't ask them to do this for us."

"What makes you say that?"

Was he serious? "Have you ever had a conversation with a Weevil? They don't talk. They growl and roar and occasionally whimper, but for the most part they just try and rip our faces off."

"Just 'cause they try and eat us doesn't mean they don't understand us. They could be choosing to ignore us."

"What? Have you been eating the funny brownies again?" Whatever possessed Owen to actually make pot brownies she had no idea, except he thought it was funny. But it wasn't funny at all, especially when she ended up eating an entire bag of Cheetos, and she didn't even like the bloody things. And there was that whole Toshiko/Ianto make out session that just seemed to embarrass everybody (except for Jack, who pronounced it "Kinda hot. To make it worse, Owen sort of agreed).

He chuckled faintly. "No. They're not as dumb as they lead us to believe. I think as a species they're just remarkably passive-aggressive."

"You're mad." But she also didn't have any better ideas, so she put the mask back on and stuck the needle in what remained of Harold's head, hoping an alien parasite didn't just explode out of the thing. That would just put a capper on a brilliant day.

Gwen soon learned she'd spoken far too soon.

The hypo full of disgusting brain juice wasn't hard to get; nothing exploded out of his cranium. But after Jack was done setting something up at Tosh's station, he told her they were going out a sewer access hatch hidden in one of the sub-levels. So, straight into the sewer, huh? She was going to start charging Torchwood for all the clothes she lost to muck and aliens.

She wanted to keep the breathing mask on, but Jack wouldn't let her. At least he took the needle full of ... well, whatever it was full of. It was tinged pink with blood.

The sewer was pitch black, and reeked ... of a sewer. It wasn't going to smell like a bakery, was it? Still, it smelled a tad better than Harold's body. She let Jack lead the way, and tried not to look down at whatever they were sloshing through as their eyes adjusted to the dimness. The silence was eerie, as heavy as the humid scent weighing down the air. "Jack, Ianto knows all the security protocols," she said, pitching her voice in a whisper. "The virus will know what to expect from him."

"So it thinks. But Ianto's going to fight them as long as he can, and that's what I'm counting on for it to work."

What? "Another surprise from the files of Tosh?"

"Basically. I've been thinking how fast Strain took over the ship, and really, all of Cardiff should be in the grip of Strain. But it's not. It's having to seriously adapt to this world. Why?"

What ship? Oh, bugger it. Even if she asked, she probably wouldn't get a straight answer. "Yeah, why?"

"Haven't you been keeping up with the news? All the hormones and chemicals being found in the water supply, the air, the ground. For once, the pollution might be a good thing. There's something here that Strain doesn't like."

"So we just get some nuclear waste and it's done?"

"If you mean the entire Human race, sure. Strain will adapt to the harsh conditions, that's what it was designed to do, so we really need to get it now before adaptation is complete."

"Somehow I have a feeling the Weevils won't get them all."

"I wasn't counting on them to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did, given time."

"But that's another thing. Even if they do track down the infected people, Jack, they're not just gonna kill the Strain. They're gonna kill the people too."

Jack did something she really didn't like: he rolled his shoulders in a regretful shrug. "Most of them are gone already, Gwen. If we kill Strain, we kill them too; that's unavoidable. Strain rewires the nervous system, makes a body a ship it can pilot. No pilot, and the ship is just dead meat."

"You said most. What about the recent infected?"

"If I can get it out of Ianto, we can try it on them as well."

"How do we separate the new from the old?"

"We don't. The Weevils do. My guess is they'll go for the ones who stink most heavily of the virus first, and that will be the older infected."

She saw several flaws in that logic, not the least of which was using the Weevils as both trackers and weapons, but before she could raise further objections, she thought she heard a noise behind her.

She paused and listened. "Jack -"

"We're surrounded," he said matter of factly, like that wasn't a big deal. But it was a big deal, because she couldn't see them, she could only hear a faint noise, growing louder, that eventually resolved itself into a chorus of growls.

Weevil faces started emerging from the darkness, alien and snarling, thin lips pulled back over jagged teeth. Her impulse was to pull out her torch, then pull out her gun, but Jack had been insistent that they not pull weapons unless absolutely necessary. This felt necessary, but he seemed to mean "under attack". She couldn't count how many were blocking both ends of the sewer tunnel, but she guessed at least a dozen, and quite probably more she just couldn't make out. If the Weevils decided to attack them, they were dead. No, strike that, she was dead – Jack would recover. Maybe that's why he was so nonchalant about all of this.

"We come in peace," Jack said, and she rolled her eyes at the cliché. "We have a similar enemy, and I think you know who it is." He threw the needle down forcefully, and she heard it shatter. After a second or two, the rumblings from the Weevils changed in pitch and tone. "We want to find them, but we don't know how. We know you can find them, that that's what the violence was all about. I think. Anyways, we're appealing for your help."

Again, a different kind of rumbling. Could Weevils snicker derisively?

"I know you have no reason to help us, except they're taking over the city. What do you think's gonna happen to you – all of you – when Strain has taken over? Please, help us before it's too late for all of us."

More rumbling, and this time one got close enough to lean in and ... was he sniffing her? Or she. Sexing Weevils was virtually impossible short of an autopsy table. But she really didn't like how close its muzzle was to her throat.

She forced herself to keep her eyes open and show no fear. Because there was no bleeding way she was going to die like a coward.